Monday, 3 June 2013

What Should You Do If Someone Steals Your Website Content?

Copyright infringement is a serious problem on the web which
is why protecting your copy and your images is extremely important.
Unfortunately however, there is little you can do to actually prevent theft of
your online material so website owners have to be vigilant and take care to
track their work to see if it has been used; if it has, then website owners
have the power to do something. There are plenty of useful tools you can use to
help you track whether or not any of your work has been stolen. Our preferred
option is Copyscape.

Contacting the site owner

If your work has been duplicated on another website, the first
and easiest step to deal with it is to contact the site owner particularly if
it looks like a genuine mistake or failure to understand the law. If their
contact details aren’t available on the site, they should in most instances be
available through domain registration details. Consider the outcome you expect
to achieve, such as removal of the content, a full citation and link to the
original or financial recompense and then send a request to the owner detailing
your required action. In some cases, it may even be the case that the site
owner is not aware that the content is duplicated as they may have used a third
party as a copywriter for example. In such cases, it is usually easy to deal
with the problem quickly and painlessly as the offending site owner is likely
to be cooperative.

Lodging a DMCA complaint:

To the hosting company or domain registrar

The DMCA tries to limit the liability of third parties such
as hosting companies and domain registrars by means of the Safe Harbour
provision. This only protects them though if they comply quickly with take down
notices. Because of this, you are likely to reach a successful outcome if you
complain to the hosting company directly which will probably take action hastily;
in all instances the accused site will be removed pending a response from the
alleged perpetrator. As this is the case, you must be extremely careful about
your accusations because if the notice is found to be spurious or inaccurate,
the accused can make counter claims for damages as compensation for the time
their site was down.

With the major search engines

Each of the major search engines has their own process
regarding how to make a DMCA complaint and usually there is a specific form to complete.
For the most part, required details include the sufficient information to find
the copyrighted work, the URL of the page with duplicated content, the URL of
the page with the original content and the contact details of the
perpetrator.All the major search
engines take copyright infringement complaints very seriously so as long as you
follow the correct procedure, you should get good results. If a website is
removed and therefore no longer comes up in the search results for a certain
keyword or keyphrase, the search engine will put a notification at the bottom
of the page of results to say that it was violating copyright law and has been
taken down.

Who should you lodge your DMCA complaint with first?

Different approaches are suitable for different situations
and both options have their disadvantages. If you choose to contact search
engines, you will have to contact each search engine individually and repeat
the process in the style required by each one which can be tedious and time
consuming. Also, the person who has stolen your material can move their site onto a different URL so the
problem is not entirely solved. That being said, the site on a new URL won’t rank so for
all intents and purposes you will have won. It is also worth noting that Google
and other search engines often keep a record of how many complaints have been
lodged against one particular site so even if the matter is not serious but it is serial,
you should still get a quick response.

If the perpetrator
has copied your material over hundreds of pages, it is easier to file the
complaint with the hosting company who will shut it down immediately. However if the
offender is deliberately and maliciously using your content, they could well
move hosts and hop from host to host making it a difficult and long game of cat
and mouse. It is therefore best to deal with the hosting company in conjunction
with the domain registrar; if the thief remounts their site on a new domain, (which is the only thing they can do to continue using your content) it
won’t rank so again, you'll have won.